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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

When I tell you that I ended up watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, you should probably know that I knew about one of its castmembers, Kyle Richards, beforehand. In high school, I sort of lost my mind over the original Halloween, in which Kyle plays Lindsey Wallace, one of the two kids whose babysitters get stalked by Michael Meyers. (She’s not Jamie Lee Curtis’s charge, however. Her babysitter, Annie, gets killed, so clearly the Wallaces didn’t hire the right girl.) Later, in college, a roommate and I ended up watching Watcher in the Woods, a 1980 Disney-produced horror movie for kids starring Kyle and Bette Davis. (The fuck, right?) I can’t remember why we watched that, but it was right around the time Paris Hilton became a thing, and I was surprised when I found out that this former child actress was Hilton’s aunt. Ever since, I’ve paid attention to Kyle Richards — an easy task considering that she was pretty much off the map, save for a recurring role on E.R.. Then, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills happened, Kyle is more off-the-moment than Paris right now, and I can no longer impress people by telling them the little girl from Halloween is Paris’s aunt. Funny how that works out.

Today, at work, I ended up stumbling onto an official-seeming website for Kim Richards — Kyle’s sister, another RHOBH castmember and an even bigger child actress. The site includes a whole lot of information about Richards family, including Kyle. The site predates Paris’s rise to fame, so the content skews in favor of the previous generation in a way that seems quaint. And the site design is wonderfully, horrifically dated, like what you remember the internet first looking like back in the day. It has pictures — stills from old TV and movies that the Richards sisters appeared in, clippings from magazines that covered the girls in their acting years, and personal photos that the family itself may have sent in. You can even send Kim Richards e-cards to your friends. Overall, It is a fucking treasure trove, even if you couldn’t care less about this family.

For example, there’s a scan of a 1979 issue of Tiger Beat featuring Kim playing a weird, two-person version of crack the whip with Todd Bridges of Diff’rent Strokes.

There’s also what looks like a catalogue shot of Kyle and Kim sitting on a fence, looking at a horse and finding the whole situation hilarious. Also, Kim’s back pocket is full of carrots.

But the best thing I found would have to be this picture, posted without context and picturing what would seem to be the time Kyle Richards fell into a Labyrinth-like world of phantasmagorical world of horrors. She apparently had to rescue a baby from it. The baby didn’t seem all that fazed by the situation.

I’m not in charge of publicity for Kyle Richards, but can I just say that if I were her, I’d be using this photo to this very day for any and all promotional purposes. Because it says so much, you know?

Here’s to the newly famous — or newly re-famous, I guess — forgetting about stuff being posted online.